Demiath's Screenthroughs, Part #3 - Mass Effect 3
0With Mass Effect 3, it's very easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Everything from the addition of a multiplayer mode to the unorthodox choose-your-playing-style option and even the game's numerous endings have been feverishly discussed by fans who obviously care deeply (perhaps a bit *too* deeply) about the series as a whole.
But with this game it's more important than ever to focus on the basic facts, because they are spectacular enough on their own. With the completion of its ambitious sci-fi trilogy, Bioware has pulled off a grand 5-year experiment the likes of which the gaming industry has simply never seen before. Sure, there are lots of classic RPGs which allows importing save files from previous installments; my personal favorite example being the implausible long-lived "Dark Savant" story arch from Wizardry 6-8 (published inbetween 1990 and 2001 (!)). But any such previous attempts are utterly dwarfed by the scale and sheer audacity of what Bioware set out to accomlish with the Mass Effect games, which include a staggering amount of big and small decisions all being carefully carried over (in some way or another) from each of the two first parts of trilogy and brought to bear upon (at least the first two thirds of) the final chapter in the epic Reaper saga. EA's desperate marketing pitch about new players being able to jump right into ME3 is not only wrong; it's also a rather disingenuous invitation to miss the point completely about what makes this game - and the fact that it even exists at all - so remarkable.
Judged very narrowly in terms of the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of the Western RPG as traditionally conceived, ME1-3 are in some ways all too predictable examples of a genre schizophrenically (although in this case also rather competently) incorporating the outwards trappings of action games and by doing so arguably getting further and further away from what used to define the genre. However, from the broader perspective of advancing interactive storytelling and coming up with new ways to engage players in a fictional world, there's no question that Mass Effect as a whole represents a ground-breaking, historic achievement in interactive entertainment (regardless of whatever one might think of the actual plot and/or its resolution). And for all those abrupt changes of direction along the way (involving everything from combat controls to class system, levelling up mechanics and the overall tone and atmosphere etc.) which have made these past 5 years into a bumpy and emotional ride for many fans, the series is a sui generis in video gaming and easily stands on its own regardless of whatever quibbles one might have over mere genre classifications. It's far from perfect but it's certainly unique, and that ultimately matters more - especially in an AAA landscape in which playing it safe has become the norm.